Is it happiness we’re all supposed to be searching for? I look around this town, this armpit called Tucson, and it seems a little less polished here, a little less filtered. The fog of bullshit isn’t quite as thick, so you can see the mirage for what it is. You see the people, and they’re all chasing it. Happiness. The American Dream.
And what is that dream? It’s money. It’s being able to pay the rent on a house you hate, to fix the goddamn transmission that just broke down on your daughter’s car or your wife’s minivan. A glimpse of happiness is being able to afford a few pounds of ground meat for a backyard barbecue on a Saturday. Or maybe, if you’re really living the high life, taking your wife out for a fifty-dollar dinner. You don’t do that too often, do you?
Happiness is the key, they tell you. And for a while, you believe it. You remember the feeling of being on that jet ski, the wind in your face. That’s happiness, right? Traveling the world, making money, people patting you on the back for a job well done. The pursuit of happiness. That’s the whole goddamn show. You work hard, you put your head down, and you move up. You get that pay raise, and you upgrade your lifestyle so you can be “happy.” Happy with the new condo, the new microwave, the new phone.
But then you see those videos they show you, the ones where they ask some ninety-year-old bastard on his deathbed, “Was it all worth it?” And every last one of them says no. “I should have pursued something else,” they rasp. Some say love, whatever the hell that means. But when I look back, when I really dig into the guts of it, it’s not love we’re after. It’s peace.
The reason you finally deal with the old ghosts of your family is because you want peace. The reason you look forward to your kids finally growing up and getting the hell out of your house is because you want peace. The feeling you get after the divorce is finally over, after the screaming stops and the lawyers have taken their last pound of flesh? That’s peace. It’s the reason we meditate, to get that yapping little ego out of the way and find a moment of quiet. It’s the reason I’m leaving this goddamn country. I want to get away from all the static so I can find some peace. And when we’re all dead and in the ground, what are we supposed to be? Peaceful.
So the pursuit of happiness, that’s just a trick. A shell game. It’s the 9-to-5 grind, the capitalist hamster wheel. To be happy in this society, you need money. But that glimpse of happiness you get when you buy something new, it never lasts, does it? What you’re really looking for is a peaceful life. A life where you’re not always worried about the next bill, not always chasing the next promotion. Just living in the present.
Every goddamn guru, every book, every YouTube video, they all talk about it. Peace. And when you’re in a peaceful place, when you’ve been stripped of everything, that’s when you can finally be yourself. That’s when you finally know who you are. And the only way you’re going to know who you are is by stripping off all the goddamn layers they plaster on you from the day you’re born.
Once those layers are gone, once there’s nobody else’s voice in your head setting the agenda, that’s when you can finally ask the real question. The one every man has in him before he gets married, before he takes the 9-to-5, before he puts on all the uniforms of a quiet, respectable life. The question is: What is my purpose? What is the whole point of being on this planet for a few thousand miserable, beautiful weeks?
If you’re not asking that, you’re not doing anything special. You’re just a goddamn zombie, running the same program as everyone else in the shitty environment you were born into by chance. You’ve compromised because you don’t want to make waves. You tell yourself, “This is the way it’s supposed to be. It’s never gonna get any better.” And you become one of them, the ones who put the peer pressure on anyone who doesn’t conform. “Why aren’t you married yet? Why don’t you have kids? Don’t you love your husband?” All that tired, old bullshit.
I was on my drive this morning, watching the sad, quiet people shuffling around, making the bare minimum because that’s all the system will give them. And I thought, if you gave any one of them an extra ten thousand dollars, they’d go rent a jet ski for an hour and call it happiness. And then they’d spend the next ninety percent of their lives chasing that feeling again.
And then, in the last few quiet moments before they die, they’ll finally understand.
It was never about happiness. It was always about the pursuit of peace.
